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Happy Sunday!

Pain is a part of life. It’s definitely not a good thing, and I wish none of us have to experience any horrible trauma, but I would be lying if I said that if you do certain things correctly, you’ll be able to avoid any kind of pain in life. No matter how cautious you are, you are gonna meet pain at some point.

So it makes sense that we learn to cope with it, learn to live with it, and also learn to grow from it. In this edition of Sunday Wisdom, I’ve written a 1,000+ word special article exclusively for my Patreon supporters: How to Grow From Your Pain.

How to Make Money By Building Something Bragworthy

COVID-19 has given us lockdowns, quarantines, and massive layoffs. But it has opened up several opportunities to start new businesses as well. I’ve been working on a couple of side projects myself so naturally I’ve been giving it a lot of thought recently.

I love the fields of investment and entrepreneurship because there’s very little space for cheap talk. You gotta put your neck on the line for what you believe. In this essay I lay out a framework to make something people need that is not only unique and bragworthy, but also makes you money.

💡 An Idea For You

The most important moments of your life are decided not by what you know, but by how you think.

The question you ought to ask yourself is: how do I think when I face a problem I haven't seen before?

Your answer to this is gonna make all the difference in the world.

It's practically not possible for you to know everything. But you can change how you think, how you approach a problem, how you deal with adversity and stress. These are skills that can be learnt. They'll give you a framework to deal with all sorts of unknown situations.

📑 I Enjoyed Reading

Who Feels Rich Really? — “You can probably think of at least one person who is wealthier than you are. Well, that wealthier person likely has some wealthier friends, so they can think of someone wealthier than themselves as well.”

Let’s Stay Together — “Memphis photographer Jamie Harmon took to the streets and asked his neighbours to stand for portraits of life under lockdown.”

The Best Bit Of Advice About Problem Solving You’ll Ever Get — “Problems, we love them—bigger and badder the better. Of course you have to be sure you have the right problem. And then you have to remember that as much as some people may want to claim it, business—and life—cannot be approached like one big engineering problem.”

The Moral Bucket List — “It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.”

Larry David, Master of His Quarantine — “Our lives now depend on staying home and doing nothing. We are cooped up with no end in sight, getting increasingly irascible. So I thought I would reach out to the world’s leading expert on the art of nothing: the endlessly irascible man whose mantra has always been: “It doesn’t pay to leave your house — what’s the point?”

The list of all the articles I’ve written can be found here. And the past three editions of Sunday Wisdom are here: 34, 33, and 32.

📹 I Enjoyed Watching

Never Split The Difference — “How do FBI hostage negotiators never split the difference? Can you use the same techniques? Chris Voss draws upon his 24-year career with the FBI to show you how to use tactical empathy with the ‘bad, the mad and the sad’ in your daily life to never split the difference and still have great relationships.”

The Importance of Dancing like an Idiot — “Dancing is one of the most releasing and necessary of all activities—but we too frequently hold back from the worry that we can’t dance. This film usefully reminds us that there’s no such thing as not being able to dance, that the whole point is to move about wildly without shame—and that in doing so, we connect with others and with important forgotten bits of ourselves.”

The Philosophy of Creativity & The Castle of Indolence — “What is creativity? I take a look at the philosophy of creativity to try and find out. Plato said the inspiration is a kind of madness. To the Ancient Greek philosopher, creativity was a kind of divine inspiration—it came from outside the limited understanding of men—a burst of lightening not reducible to human reason.”

Vice Guide to Iran — “Over the past weeks and months, Iran has descended into chaos. From the downing of a passenger jet to the assassination of a top general, and now one of the world’s largest coronavirus outbreaks, life in the Islamic Republic is facing its toughest challenges since it was founded in 1979.”

🤔 Worth Thinking About

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

— Charlie Munger

As always, if you’re enjoying Sunday Wisdom, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I try to make it one of the best emails you get every Sunday, and I hope you’re enjoying it.

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And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.